Yardie (prime)/Vignette: To You
Title: Vignette: To You
Author: Yardie
In a stained white parchment, a letter penned in a right-slanted manuscript rests on top of a live-edge cypress table. In the Dark Elven tongue, it reads:
To You,
In a few weeks, I will be with my fellow Faendryl to partake in the Palestra Trials. This marks my return to New Ta’Faendryl since…my previous life. I would say that the demons strike me with fear, and they do, but it is the prospect of returning to my sins and my crimes that haunts me most. It also marks my return home since my mother’s murder. Did they at least leave me the courtesy of a grave to plant flowers? Will I get the chance to apologize to her for my actions? Will people remember me for who I once was? Only time will tell.
I have lived an eventful life. Many of my tribulations are of my doing: my bartering, my previous captivity, my time under the whip, my escape, and my hiding in plain sight. At times, when I return amongst those people, the guilt wells up like a sorcerer’s void, pulling me in and shredding me into a million pieces. Iskandr should have turned me in long ago…maybe finished the job. Maybe he was right to leave me in the snow. I don’t know if I deserved that second chance. I know that I have deserved every terrible thing I have wrought. I am not a good person, though I try my best to...atone. It is penance. Yet, despite those tribulations, I'm still here.
Madame Niadriel unleashed the demon so long ago, and, despite its destruction, I fled the horrors it caused. I used to consider that action a survivor’s instincts in play. Now, I look upon that day with cowardly embarrassment, regretting the men, women, and children I left to pay the consequences for her choices and actions…for our complicit behavior. It was not a strategic exit but a capitulation to fear. I realize now that the fear will never go away, the dread that wells up fiery bile out of the gullet, but now it is a weapon—I hope to unleash it to the best of my ability.
If my fate is sealed by a demon or by my fellow Faendryl, and I do not return to the land of the living, I leave this letter to you. The other contents will go to Nazarr through Vaerno, my brother’s companion. It is the only document that reveals the truth and the forces that lurk out of the public eye. I hope the lessons imparted by Blade Arku give me some understanding, but, as is the job, nothing simulates what happens at that moment. Despite my preparations for marks and clients, I have never faced a demon before. Everything I know has brought me to this day, and I can no longer run from it.
Despite it all, I thank you for all you’ve done for me—uplifting me when I may have been downtrodden—excusing my judgment lapses, and aiding my endeavors to improve. It is, in part, why I am doing this. Perhaps this is one long will, but everything has brought me to this moment. I can no longer run from it, from them, from the nature of my course. I may fail, and I expect those who have wished me ill to rejoice in my stumbles, but I faced my demons in the end. That is the truest victory. That is what I believe it means to be Faendryl.
The last lines contain a shift to the Common language, the fragment, perhaps, an error of grammar and syntax.
So much more to give,
I, Phantom